Blog Comments & Posts

My view of "effective" (from a long term sustainability point of view) is probably the same as yours, I'm offering a counter-point for the sake of broadening the debate. It is important to note that PBNs still work because though I would never personally recommend it, many good, honest, SEO folk will be up against people using them in churn-and-burn sites, and you've got to know what black hat techniques still work and you could be up against in competitive SERPs. I work in-house on corporate B2B websites so I wouldn't touch them! However, to suggest otherwise of their potential effectiveness could be construed by some as being naive to the point of being unhelpful.

Whilst I would agree with a lot of, if not most of, what you've said, to suggest that PBNs are no longer are effective is simply not true. It may be black hat, it may be "unethical" (if one believes in SEO ethics), it may be a huge risk to any legit company out there, it may be a lot harder than it used to be, but even with all these caveats it cannot possibly be stated they are no longer effective if carried out properly.

Just because something is harder than it was, or is black hat and is definitely not recommended for long term sustainable growth, doesn't mean it isn't effective.

This is going to vary hugely depending on the sector you are in and the on-site technical performance of your site. Research is always interesting but it is extremely important people take note of the caveats the auhor mentioned about this being a very small data set.

I hope the author doesn't mind me using elements of his post verbatim here, interspersed with my own take on it. I urge you to read his orginal post in full!

The reason I refer back to this here is the funnel diagram, where crucially the "Awareness" stage is sub divided down into "Unaware of the problem" and "Problem Awareness". This is important because you've got two very different mindsets here.

Unaware of the problem I personally refer to as the "Unknown unknowns" - This is the very beginning of the process, when our prospects are fully 'at rest.' They don't know us, they don't what we do, and they don't even know they have a problem. The opportunity is audience development, and building an audience of people interested in related topics for businesses in general. The idea is that we can subsequently convert after they've grown to know and trust us.

We need to get the right people to our site and then bring them into a permission marketing asset – be it an email list (the best if you're set up with something like Eloqua for marketing automation; a real cornerstone of successful B2B marketing when done correctly), a social audience, or a retargeting pool for PPC.

Problem Awareness – “The ‘How do I?’ stage?”

This is the next step on the buying path. Our prospects know they have a problem and are actively looking for information, but they may not really understand what we do yet – or even what to do to solve their problem. At this point we can get ahead of the game by creating landing pages and content about their problems and pain points. This is classic SEO territory; creating useful assets on the website which we can specifically target to phrases we want to rank for as they will bring through increasingly relevant traffic; albeit in small volumes for many B2B companies.

Links in embeddable content? I know it was Back To The Future day this week but did you set your time co-ordinates for 2011? It used to be all the rage before Matt Cutts called it out, way before Guest Blogging was also done so.

If it still works for people, then that's great, but really if you're working on corporate websites are people still really going to be recommending that? Some of the stuff recommended here might be ok for churn-and-burn SEO but it's kind of risky if you're after longevity of tactics.

I'm sure that is largely the reason too. It's a shame though because (as an in-house practitioner) I know I can share any successes I have had (which isn't nearly as many as I would like!!) without fear I am "giving away" any secrets, because I'm not in danger of losing any clients. No clients here... only senior management and/or finance departments to placate!

I've spoken a couple of times publicly, but it is such a time-sink to prepare even a half decent presentation that apart from the "personal brand building" (yuck - I hate that term!) then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the time.

The reason us in-house folk often stick to the shadows at conferences is that we're afraid we'll be sales-pitched to within an inch of our lives by dozens of baying agencies if we mingle too much!

Edit: Previous comment edited so this comment now looks out of place. Leaving for reference.

I'm sorry I don't understand your point. I'm saying the vast majority of industry events have speakers from agency side, and you responded saying most of the attendees (i.e. delegates) of one particular conference are in-house. I don't understand the point you are making here, I appreciate English is not your first language but it appears you're not talking about the same point as I am!

Regarding your theory at the end, do you really think Google are crawling Tweets to the depth AND putting that level of emphasis on the data within? Also, how many steps removed would still be relevant to to rank the "end" source?

P.S. I thought you had said you'd not wear those white glasses on WBF again!

Fantastic article! I shall be quoting & referencing pieces of it for an internal report I am writing. I've spent my career in B2B search so it's great to read articles which isn't the usual eCommerce related pieces which are far more prevalent.

I like to call the "no problem awareness" stage the "unknown unknown" stage; people don't know we exist because they don't even know such a service exists (because it hasn't occurred to them there's another way of doing things), that always seems to go down well here as a way of understanding that we have several layers of "unknown" to strip away before we can even generate leads.

Given that you are struggling to recruit engineers and you are one of many similar products in a space rife with continual disruption, how concerned are you that ~89% of your revenue comes from a single product?

Mine would be that "SEO isn't marketing". So many people in business, and frankly who claim to do SEO, that don't think SEO is an integrated part of a marketing strategy and can be done in a silo. If you "do SEO" then you "do marketing" and as such you should have a well rounded view of how it fits into other online and offline marketing efforts. Yes, it's up there with some of the most technical forms of marketing at times, but it is marketing nevertheless.

The amount of SEOs which don't even have a basic grasp of PPC, let alone any other types of marketing, never ceases to depress me.

This is a detailed response from Gianluca, but I have a real life example of a multinational & multi-lingual business, rather than just theory, when following some of this advice would be incorrect and would have harmed our business.

Points of note:

"if yours is a multicountry strategy, then the real question starts to be: subdomains or territorial domain names? Quite probably the correct answer would be: cTlds."

Could you elaborate what this is based on? I work in-house for a multinational which had a mixture of subdomains ans ccTLDs. I made the decision to bring all of this under one website all in a sub-folder country & language format using hreflangs.

The result of this was no loss of organic traffic where we moved away country websites on a ccTLD, and a significant increase in traffic in the countries where we moved away from the sub-folder of the root domain. It also mitigates the need for cross-domain rel canonicals.

I would say though that this strategy would be different for everyone, not least depending on your global business priorities, your IT capabilities and how your site is linked to around the world to name but a few. There is no one correct answer here, not even "quite probably" a single vision of the truth.

Could you also further explain this please:

Google is quite good in recognizing that even the content between both URLs is 99% identical, that 1% of difference is giving to the content of those pages a unique value, therefore they cannot be considered as "identical".

I'm not sure if there is a language-barrier issue with your comment here, because that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. e.g. A page with 200 words which only has 2 different words isn't duplicate content?! I think though I may be mis-reading the point you are trying to make here.

We moved part of our site from sub-domain to sub-folder back in November. Almost a 100% increase in organic traffic. (I've tweeted the GA stats should anyone want to see the evidence). No other changes made, no new links of any note. If you want organic traffic it's Hobson's choice.

I was pretty rage filled when I started reading this, but it did subside as I read on! This was mainly because to me it felt you started off making one point on a more data-driven scientific point of view which I vehemently disagree with, but then the piece evolved into more about how the best SEOs don't just know old-school SEO, which I very much agree with.

This is part of the reason why I advocate in-house SEO as you get a broader exposure to all aspects of online and offline marketing techniques which can compliment your skillset. I do as much PPC and split testing as I do SEO and I sit next to our brand team who create our company mascot and book our space on billboards, along with all the other aspects which we undertake so I have exposure to all kinds of marketing. So I know a little about CRM systems, and I know the data we can collect, and the emails we send out to potential customers, which might influence how people might start searching for our website, products & services. An agency consultant who preaches about "SEO best practice" in a vacuum will struggle to see the bigger picture from their funky agency offices churning out reports and getting annoyed because we can't implement their recommendations perfectly!

I still have serious concerns though how Moz still allows spurious correlations and tiny data sets to be presented in a way which implies a single truth to those who are new to the business. I don't think it is helpful, for example, to run a survey with 128 responses from people who we have no idea if they are really experienced enough to answer and call it a ranking factors survey. That's just my opinion though of course! Others will disagree with me here.

It's just that given the recent guest Whiteboard Friday debacle, I just think the credibility of what is discussed here has been shaken a little and sometimes there needs to be a clearer understanding of proper data research methods, and what is pure opinion, personal experience and conjecture. Both are indeed useful, they are just very different beasts which aren't always that clearly labelled to the masses on here.

My tongue was firmly in my cheek when I posted that, however for the purposes of clarity; although I may sometimes have megalomaniac tendencies, I do not feel that my comments represent "the entire world".

A really great read, I love a proper real-world example! Thank you for compiling & sharing this.

The only thing I would be add would be right at the outset, just check that you can rely on what you're seeing in Google analytics (or whatever analytics you have). On more than one occasion in my experience, some "clever" Dev has filtered out some bot traffic, or removed some Analytics tags, or something else which corrupts the data we get from Analytics which would really mess up any SEO analysis.

Clearly not the case in this example but I think it's worth bearing in mind. Always question the data you are presented with!

Very interesting as always, here's my two-penneth worth on a few of the predictions:

2 - Google will continue the trend of providing instant answers in search results with more interactive tools.

I think it will go even further than this, I don't think it will just be an increase in tools, but an increase in ways you can start financial transactions directly from a Google search. I can only see something like Google Flights getting bigger, which is likely to hit the flight comparison websites hard. I think there is also scope for them to move into "foreign exchange" (an area I know very well, so you can not only just look up the exchange rate from $ to £ to Euro etc, but also the ability to start a transaction online. So there will be an increase in paid partnership opportunities for companies there, to the detriment of comparison websites organically.

5 - The EU will take additional regulatory action against Google that will create new, substantive changes to the search results for European searchers.

The EU is a very complicated organisation, and you're more likely to see individual EU countries make changes (e.g. Spain on Google News & Germany has a history of Google privacy concerns). The trouble is with the EU just because they pass a "law", doesn't necessarily mean each member state is going to adopt the ruling in full and it is often open to an individual country's interpretation. Sorry to get so political! Being in the UK, I'm less concerned about this in general. (Also, there's a possible referendum in 2015/16 whether we even want to remain as a part of the EU)

I think this will be true for free users. However, I think there will be a bigger push towards Google Analytics Premium, and I think this product will start to provide more information than the free version. It's a big money spinner and although it is, in my opinion, more crude than Adobe Analytics (SiteCatalyst) it is likely to grow and improve this year significantly, as it's a huge potential revenue stream for Google. Sampled data on the free account just isn't good enough if you have a medium-large sized (in terms of traffic) website.

I appreciate that a representative sample size is important rather than pure size, but you can't make a comparison to political polls because (in the US) there are basically only two variables - you're either a donkey or an elephant out there, right?! Google SERPs are to all intents and purposes infinite in the amount of variable outcomes, but I understand the underlying point you're making around "asking the right questions" (I just don't think you've used a great example there to highlight this). To be honest I don't know enough about how your 1-10k keywords were selected so I wouldn't want to pass too much further comment on that.

I appreciate that it's not a paid for tool and that others may find it useful for which you have cited anecdotal evidence, but I just wanted to outline what "my truth" was for this data because I worry too many people in the industry take such data sets as de facto in such matters when as you and me both know, it certainly isn't. I know you have gone at length to explain that this is indeed the case but in posts as lengthy and complex as this, it's just that it is all to easy for many *ahem* "professional" SEOs just to look at the headline stats and make business decisions off that without even a cursory understanding of the data. That of course is arguably their problem though, not yours!

As per usual I hope that my critical analysis of such posts on Moz is taken in the constructive, counter-point light which it is intended, and genuinely it is your posts I look forward to reading the most on Moz.

Wow. Well that was quite an epic read, and for me got increasingly disappointing as it goes on. The post is less about "How Big was Penguin 3.0" and more an (increasingly desperate as the post goes on) defence of the supposed quality of MozCast data.

The data sets aren't just a "small and imperfect representation of the entire world of Google", it's positively microscopic. I think I read somewhere there are around 6 billion searches on Google a day (of course not all unique, but that's just noted for scale), and you're tracking 10,000 keywords?

I honestly admire your tenacity and your belief in the product, and the open nature of you and your company is genuinely to be admired, but all a post like this does for me to is remind me why I'd never be a user for a product such as this when the data is so clearly flawed. Or if not flawed, so so freaking tiny as to be insignificant.

You also to your credit note that Pierre Far has said the scope of the update and how long it would take to roll out, so an analysis after 3 weeks rather than 5 days would be of more interest to me.

There's not really a way of me being able to say all this without coming across as a douchebag, which isn't my intention (although "your truth is your truth" on this matter as well!) but the data in this tool may as well be random for all the insight it gives me. I really appreciate your thinking about the tool being in existence to answer the question "is it just me?" and trying to put a scientific process to the data, but for me, it's just not anywhere near the place it would need to be.

I'm not sure throwing stones in glass houses is particularly wise, or "TAGFEE". Are you confident all of the advice you've ever written to do with SEO is sound? Are you sure you're in a position where your interpretation of what Google has said regarding their Intellectual Property (i.e. how their search engine works) is "better" than that of anyone else in the industry?

I also find it somewhat sycophantic that you denounce a number of other SEOs studies but you find the one which Moz have created to be a "shining example" since I think them following a "solid scientific method" is a little bit of an exaggeration, as they are hardly worthy of publication in a scientific journal.

I am sure this post will attract a number of thumbs down, and I will be accused myself of not being "TAGFEE", however, I felt writing this response would at least explain why I have thumbed down this post.

"Even with this longer period, all URLs returned within just a few hours of cancelling the URL removal request."

However it looks as if traffic took a couple of days to return from the attached chart. Was the traffic in line with what you would normally expect to the site on those days (i.e. because 26th July was a Saturday)?

I thought this was an interesting write up, but for me it fell into a oft-sprung trap of assuming everyone's brain is wired in the same way as yours.

Of course it is always good to step back, take a breath, and think things through. However, problems arise when humans try to impose their set of values on other people, or assume because they think a certain way that others must think, or be capable of thinking, in the same way too. Oftentimes, they aren't. People are different and have different almost hardwired cultural values. When people try to impose a set of rules on someone else this is what leads to conflict in the workplace, and sadly war in the wider human society. Expecting people to think the same way you do can either lead to conflict, or frankly people just walking all over you (especially in your "change your story" section as an example).

Anger is often seen as a negative emotion, but it isn't and it has a place sometimes. Frankly it would be weird if people didn't get angry, it's just passion that needs an outlet. However there is possibly a psychological issue if people start losing the plot over a doughnut! :)

I couldn't agree more which is why I keep pushing in-house search marketers over agencies all day long. You get exposed to the entire marketing strategy of a company that way and you build up valuable skills outside of the search bubble. Of course there is always a need to outsource to experts but for me any company which has say at least 5 people in their marketing team should be looking to hire an in-house search expert.

Do you think sometimes it could be as simple as having "SEO" or "links" in the link/anchor text/domain?

Maybe there are a list of red flag words and phrases that can just trip you up sometimes. I know it sounds crude, but there must be some sort of automation going on in generating these GWT warnings, and like everything it will take time for this to become more sophisticated. Google talks about "problematic sites" and I am sure a lot of these sites use these words and phrases a lot.

Thanks for the response. I wish I could take credit for the entire blog strategy at my company but it far pre-dates my time as the in-house search guy here! However, I have been able to optimise it quite a bit in the past few months (that's a win for my mini "in-house crusade" and having the power to lobby & influence effectively!).

So you're correct in the fact that the blog wasn't created solely for SEO purposes. The plan is part of a huge PR/Comms/thought leadership positioning for our business. SEO is a happy benefactor of this strategy.

Well, our blog is still a huge work in progress (if you'd seen it a few months ago you'd have been mortified from an SEO perspective) but thanks for the free consultancy! I'll not go on about it any more specifically here as it wouldn't be of interest to anyone else but me :)

The fact that you say "it depends" though is really the crux of my original point. Find something which works for your business, it isn't simply (to paraphrase 50 Cent) get comments or die tryin' which is kind of how the original post positions itself.

"comments not necessarily are a valid "metric" for determining the success of a blog"

as a follow up to you saying:

"I cannot add that much more than you already covered, apart underlining the importance of comments in blogs."

Stick to your guns, tell me I'm wrong, I love a good debate but don't pander to the post with a few thumbs up! :)

I do take your point about if you rarely get comments then just switch them off. We may well actually do that on reflection, but it really isn't a priority or a worry for us. As a sole in-house SEO I've a lot bigger fish to fry in the short term.

Back to my original point, It's not that I'm saying comments don't work for some people, Moz clearly being a prime example, but it was the sweeping generalisation it was that or nothing which I disagree with. However, the real nugget from the blog post is this:

"Hire people who can actually write"

That is what has made our blog a success for us. SEOs often think we are copywriters. Usually, we are not. If we were, then Panda may not have had such a big impact! I don't think we are the exception that proves the rule. I think we found a way that works for us, and that you should never make such sweeping generalisations in digital marketing saying it's "this or nothing".

An interesting article, but I don't agree with your findings in the slightest. I fail to see how you can say shares, tweets and likes are vanity metrics but comments aren't.

A comment doesn't mean there is a positive engagement with your brand. I appreciate it takes more time and effort to write a comment but firstly it doesn't mean they are all necessarily positive and secondly, it doesn't help to increase the reach of your brand like sharing does.

We use our company blog to be a thought leader in our sector. This has meant that our comms team has been able to get us international exposure on some of the biggest media outlets in the world. It is also on Google News and frequently rubs shoulders with all the broadsheet media in the blended Google News results for breaking news in our sector... not bad for a "fail" blog with no comments!

The overall ROI for our blog therefore is epic. It has been cited by clients as a reason for them trusting our brand and is also used to mail out to clients who prefer to read the content via email. I'm in charge of the search side of things, but the blog is used as an integrated part of not just our marketing strategy, but our entire business strategy.

Blog comments are vanity. Blog comments don't pay the bills. The bottom line is what counts. I appreciate the Moz model of building up a community via their blog and it works for them, but there's more than one way to skin a cat.

Wonderful post, you sound like the kind of guy people really want to come to work for, which isn't a common a trait as it ought to be, in any industry quite frankly. Good luck in taking your agency up to the next level.

Edit: By the way your line You've been an SEO for over 15 years? Good for you. Now sit down and listen to everyone else's ideas. Be an equal. is possibly the best line anyone has ever written. Way too much of that attitude going on in Search for my liking!

So basically it's only going to be a bad thing if you're doing bad things with one or more of your websites? Also I wouldn't rely on SpyOnWeb too much, just punched in our site and it didn't come up with most of the shared properties we have.

Most importantly of all, is that the one true ring to rule them all? "Them" being the Search Engines, obviously! :)

I think it's more the validity of the analysis of the data rather than the data itself he is picking up on. The findings in the data don't match up with the findings of the narrative in the original piece.

Very interesting and certainly something to aide discussions with to senior management when explaining: "we need quality content, but it's going to take time to see results, and it won't be direct conversions either".

Question: How would you go about measuring the success over time of a concerted content marketing effort given the blurred correlation between successful content marketing and an increase in conversions from various channels? Is it simply the number of touchpoints prior to conversion? (I know you touched on this at the end of the video but felt this was the most important part of the piece)

I ask because whilst I'm totally bought into what you're saying, but those that control the purse strings in companies need to see an ROI on all marketing efforts to sign stuff off.

I think this attitude is a breath of fresh air, and it's something I've been an advocate of in my own career at least, often describing myself as a "digital marketer who specialises in search". Thankfully I've had roles in large organisations where I work alongside talented marketers who specialise in things like design, email, branding, data management etc and also in my own role I was required to diversify first from SEO to PPC, and then to split testing/CRO and social media.

This is why I am such an advocate of being an in-house search specialist (having also worked agency side) because you'll not only get exposure to wider marketing disciplines but over time you'll develop an understanding of them which gives you a better chance to progress your marketing career. Otherwise as a search only specialist you're kind of either going to need to be happy at a certain level (bar a very few very senior search only roles), or take the plunge and go freelance and then start an agency if you've got any ambition.

The problem search agencies will have trying to expand is that companies (clients) will often either already have other agencies which are better than you at other disciplines of digital (no disrespect, but if that's what they've done for years, they will be) or they'll have good people in-house and the search agency is filling a skills gap so they won't want you to give wider advice.

So, good luck to you, I really mean that, but I know which side of the agency/in-house divide I think has developed my career in leaps and bounds!

That was a very comprehensive post! Lots of good info in there. One point though, since we are all currently in a Google fearing state of affairs right now (MyGuestPost, anyone?) then I'm kind of inclined to say "How high?" when Google says "Jump." at the moment.

Therefore: "Consider using dynamic serving instead of pure responsive: this allows you to serve different HTML based on user agent, while maintaining a single URL for simplicity." I just can't buy into this given that it isn't Google's recommended way of doing things:

Blimey, if Google actually tells me to do something in bold type, then I really think I will have to! I think Responsive is the answer to everything, but you're quite right that you need to make sure you order everything on the page correctly.

Hi Michael, some interesting points you make there. Would you happen to have a reference for your figure of "under 4%"? It certainly isn't true for any of the dozen websites I've worked on in the last 12 months that's all. I appreciate that a lot of the mobile growth is in Africa & Asia, but still...

Also what's your thinking behind "thinking about mobile in 10 years or so" given the irrefutable evidence provided in this blog post (and elsewhere) about the growth of mobile internet usage v. desktop? Again regional trends are very important but the growth is still there in the "Western World", isn't it?

Sadly there are still an awful lot of agencies out there who promise the world then fail to deliver, which makes life hard for the rest of us. I'm talking about agencies big and small, especially if they have over zealous sales staff.

As an in-house guy I see this time and time again, agencies which don't understand what a business is about and don't understand how much resource they can actually commit.

A fascinating, if very scary read. Negative SEO is in danger as becoming as big, if not a bigger problem, as DoS Attacks for a business. DoS attacks are usually short sharp shocks to a company, where as a Negative SEO campaign could lead to longer term damage to a company. If a company loses all their search visibility people's jobs could be on the line. I don't just mean the poor beleaguered SEO but everyone at the company if revenue stops coming in.

I can forsee Negative SEO or as I'm starting to call them "Denial of Search Engine Rankings Attacks" (DoSER Attacks) become a real problem over the next couple of years unless Google helps us out here but discounting rather than punishing the spam.

It does also show why Search needs to be fully integrated into all aspects marketing to ensure there are many routes to market for acquiring traffic/custom because for anyone that relies on organic search for their business, they are in an extremely vulnerable position.

If you have extensive Adwords campaigns, make sure you make sure of the new Paid & Organic reports in there. No historical data but it will give you plenty of organic keyword data. I was at a Google event the other week and asked them about the accuracy of this data and they said it is pulled through in the same way as Google Webmaster Tools but it isn't rounded. Therefore, I think it should be more accurate and it certainly collates well with the data I do still have on organic keywords in Adobe Analytics. It's not perfect, but then what is these days?

Of course when you work in a big enterprise, even getting a tag management system approved is a huge effort... in fact even more so than getting individual tags added because the developers would not like the idea of not being in control of which tags are firing.

So you'd still have to go through them since they are the gatekeepers who control the websites (however much marketing like to think they do!). It's just shifting the problem, not solving it.

However the Byzantine rules big businesses employ with regards to websites aren't Google's fault and it looks like a good tool, and this was a helpful article. I'll just go back to begging developers to make changes now.... *sigh*

I'm always wary of giving anything remotely like constructive criticism on here, because I always feel anyone that does so gets drowned out by the nauseating sycophantic responses from a certain group of regular commenters here.

However, I'm going to go for it today regardless. In my opinion, that inforgraphic wasn't particularily useful. You've tried to convey far too much information on a subject which needs to be kept simple in the first instance if it is going to be done properly. The thing is there is good advice in there, and in the post, but it is in my opinion incomplete and surrounded by too much non-essential information. I totally agree that a clear hypothesis after conducting research is the foundation of a good split test, for example.

"Build a community, create a platform for gamification". That kind of statement is the kind of language which makes a great sound-bite but is ultimately, in my opinion, meaningless. Not only is that exceptionally difficult to do, it is hardly a pre-requisite for accurate testing or indeed CRO in general. Yes, you can argue that this and other points in sections 5 and 6 are all just suggestions but since you've created the infographic in the style of a flow chart it implies you can't do any testing until you've covered off all these points previously.

I also don't find it particularly useful to suggest over 20 different tools to use in one post. Keep it simple, just recommend a couple, so that people don't get bogged down in researching tools rather than actually doing the work.

When it comes to testing you've also missed out fundamental advice as to the length of time a test will need to run for, and the variables which will affect this.

Richard, I saw you present last November at the Conversion Conference in London and I'm sure you would agree with me that if people want to really learn about CRO then they need to check out Bryan Eisenberg in the first instance.

Well, I certainly read this article with interest and it appears that agency life is working out well for you. My personal concerns with this post are the very immature way in which you present yourself, and how this is indicative of large swathes of the industry.

It's this kind of attitude we've experienced in my company from large agencies which has lead us to stop using their services. I'm certainly not impressed by childish comments of swear words when used in any business environment, and I find it irksome that SEO seems to think it is any different.

Perhaps you deal with clients who are immature in their outlook but I can assure you that, for example, our international banking services site promotes exactly the kind of message you claim that "nobody cares" about and that "making it fun" is grossly inappropriate for a lot of businesses and would lose us massive amounts of custom, even if we did gain a few more links out of it.

The most frustrating thing for me about your post is that just as you begin to say something worthwhile; "we are going to become a news hub for the industry...", you follow up the questions that a business manager/owner would be totally justified in asking with a childish comment.

I know that critical comments never go down well on here, but I hope I have expressed myself well enough so that people can understand why I have been so.

I manage websites which are large players in the UK media space (within their specific niches at least), as such we often break stories which the mainstream UK media will pick up on. The Google News Sitemap is brilliant but one word of warning you must EXACTLY match the publication name which Google knows you by. All capitalisation for example must match the format Google knows you by when you do a "site:" command within Google News otherwise the XML sitemap is not going to work.

I think you're right, there is an element of trolling in the original article to which you are responding. However I think there is a nugget of truth in what he says. I agree with you Rand that there are many shining examples of excellent usage of social media which have driven bottom line profit. However, it is all too easy for people to say: "yeh so liek I'm totaly a social media expert lol kthxbye" when they've got no business acumen or any kind of marketing experience.

I for one would certainly never employ anyone who described themselves as a "rockstar" "guru" or "ninja" to name but a few ridiculously childish terms which have infiltrated the online marketing arena. I want to work with professional marketers, not people that think speaking like a pre-pubescent boy is the way to conduct yourself within a business (even if that's the language you need to use to reach your customers, you don't use it in the office as far as I'm concerned).

If that was the case, and the content was to remain on your site but the credit was due elsewhere surely you would just link to the guy who wrote the content?

The canonical is clearly about managing duplicate content. It's about attributing ownership (be it on a page-by-page basis or a domain-by-domain basis). If the content only exists in one place, why are canonicals even a serious option? Either 301 your pages to where you want the user to go, or in your scenario, chuck the guy a link.

To me the advice Rand gives in this video goes completely against what rel=canonical is intended for, and goes against advice given in the post Rand links to on this site above.

Going by this, it could be construed that you're abusing the use of the canonical with your randz.net > new blog. It's not the same content, you said in the video it's all old stuff on randz.net. So you're using the cross domain canonical but not pointing to a copy of the same (or very similar) content. That doesn't sound terribly white hat to me.

You've given a great example as to how it should be used with the History of SEOmoz post, but then gone against what is recommended in other posts on SEOmoz as to how canonicals should be used.

Good follow up post to your presentation at SES which I attended. Yours was one of the better presentations in what was a slightly disappointing day for me. It's nice to get confirmation of what we are striving to achieve on the sites which I'm involved in.

"Increasing your site speed is a highly important area as Google is about speed"

I'd be interested to see how you justify that statement given that Matt Cutts said fewer than 1% of search queries would be affected. So if you're site is that slow you fall into this category then however they find your site (via search or otherwise) they'll get annoyed and leave. So please, how is it a "highly important area because Google is about speed"? Google is about quality, of which speed is just one tiny factor. Sorry, but statements like this one you made really cheese me off, it's so fundamentally misleading.

The original post above makes this quite clear in the paragraph "how important is site speed?"

If you're giving any kind of presentation at the front of the room, never organise your attendees with their back to you as per the clusters diagram. If people have to twist round in their seats they won't feel comfortable.

Also Ice Breakers... be very careful when and how you use them. They can be unbelievably cringe-worthy, I guess especially so for us more reserved Brits!

Working in-house, it's always great to see articles from an this perspective. Although it varies greatly depending on the size of the organisation you work for I pretty much follow these steps on a daily basis. I particularly agree with the training side of things, a little bit of education really does help oil the gears in the workplace, especially as us SEOs are often the go-between from the wider marketing department and the dev teams. That's why I like working in-house way more than when I was at an agency, I find there are more opportunities to really get involved with a site from the ground up if you manage to build the right working relationships.

I don’t think I or anyone else that thumbed this down “missed the boat” (I assume you mean “missed the point”) at all. I think there are two main reasons why this article hasn’t gone down well with large sections of the readership:

The title of the post is misleading. By entitling it with the year 2011 implies that these are new things to be avoided. The inference is that until very recently it was ok to do these things if you want to go down the white hat route. If it was sold more clearly that the post was about tactics which were deemed acceptable when dinosaurs roamed the Earth then that wouldn’t be so bad. There’s no new material here of note.

Perhaps more importantly, a lot of these tactics still work as pointed out by a lot of SEOs in their responses. I’m fortunate enough to work on huge sites so I can do “clean” SEO. However I have worked in little agencies where the pressure for quick results is immense. The fact is a lot of these tactics are necessary for many SEOs. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, but they work, because Google isn’t perfect. It’s against their rules and might come back to bite you in the bum down the line, but if you need quick results then the Dark Side is very seducing.

I say good on people for not succumbing to the blind “great post” mentality here, because the sycophantic nature of some respondents is somewhat grating at times. As has been mentioned above by another poster, this is a respected industry blog and as such the quality of posts expected is very high. I’m sure there is a pressure to produce a new post every day for this site, and hey, I’m not even paying to be here(!) but if you willingly put the content out there, you’ve got to accept the rough with the smooth, the adulation and the criticism. (By the way I’m not saying the authors don’t, they are generally very good at responding to feedback).

I hope this is viewed in the light in which it is intended, as constructive criticism and as an explanation as to why I didn’t like the original post. I’d not justify why I thumbed someone down in such depth if I wasn’t trying to be helpful.

This is a really useful article for social media marketers, and for all digital marketing professionals who don't specialise in SEO. As far as I am concerned, this is the year that being an SEO is defunct. By which I mean the various threads of online marketing will have merged to such a point that no one should be claiming SEO is a service that can be provided in total isolation, it's time to embrace becoming more and more integrated into overall marketing strategies.

However, there is one point I really much take issue with. Right at the start you say: "it's becoming very clear that getting a page to rank highly in the search engines takes a combination of the two disciplines." I think, that once again, an SEOmoz blog post has succumbed to hyperbole. Social media signals have been officially recognised by Google (i.e. by Matt Cutts in a Webmaster Video) as a ranking signal. However, they are but one signal of over 200 so I hardly think that in all cases you must employ social media to rank for a particular phrase. For faster moving terms, I would agree more so, but that doesn't cover every scenario. I understand your sentiment, and from my opening paragraph I clearly do not fundamentally disagree with the way things are going, but I think you just need rein it in just a bit. It might imply to a novice it's "do or die" in all cases for all search terms on all sites which I really see no compelling evidence offered for. I will read your "ending hunger in sierra leone" test results with interest, but this will only prove what works in the short term at the moment. Social media is a transient medium, and as such I predict that applied as a ranking factor, it is logical to assume that the positive effects would be so too.

I hope you (and more to the point readers) can accept what is intended as polite, constructive criticism because I still believe this to be a very valuable post.

Of course the difference is for email marketers that they can rent very large email lists for a relatively small sum of money, so actually it's relatively easy to reach an audience this way for a new business. Naturally though, if you don't have the site to back it up when people arrive, well that's another matter. For me personally, I think email is a better way to start for a business from scratch than simply relying on social media and "white papers". It's hard to suddenly become a credible source of research if you're new to the scene

As always, no one sucessful mix will be the same for any new company or website.

A legitimate question might be "name 3 popular SEO blogs/communities/forums" to prove that you read around the latest industry developments. SEOMoz would of course be on this list, but this site is not the be-all-and-end-all. Honestly, such sycophantic posts drive me mad.

Don't be so naive, a company may not have a budget or the sign-off to work on social media campaigns. Many people may have very specific remits, particularly those working in-house, or an SEO might be a separate job role to a specialist Social Media expert so the SEO themselves might not do any social media... it doesn't mean they are living in a cave ignoring it!

This is great data, but comments like this prove you have to interpret with care (as the guys at Distilled to their credit point out). A nice infographic too (although last time I checked Antarctica isn't a country, it's a continent!)

I totally agree with seo-himanshu, because traffic is an (almost) worthless metric as a stand alone figure. I am frustrated that people in the industry can't move on and realise that SEO should be an integrated part of marketing efforts to secure increased valuable conversions, not just a race for rankings and visits. This is only useful at a basic level to maintain a check on indexation levels of the site.

This is a good starter point for people. Although not necessarily "basic", image sitemaps are massively important. After proper implementation of these on one of my image database type site, I saw an increase of several thousand visits per month with no other changes of note on the site. These results were from the blended/universal search and not specific image searches (which are only a tiny percentage of the visits accrued.)

I'm more inclined to think that Facebook Places will win out over Foursquare, eventually. Foursquare is some way off reaching critical mass in terms of users and whilst points and badges are fun, it's hardly intellectual property. As Facebook Places develops it could easily come up with similar gimmicks and is at a massive advantage due to the amount of users Facebook has.

I think users are going to be more interested in the check-ins and reviews of people on their existing friends list in Facebook rather than the reviews of random near by strangers, or the comparitviely limited set of friends active on Foursquare. Foursquare has the advantage for now in terms of a developed offering, but already I know more of my friends who have used Facebook Places over Foursquare simply because it's there in front of them when they use Facebook on their Smart Phones.

I think anyone seriously worried by this needs to chill out a bit to be honest. For me Google has proved itself enough over the years for me to have a little faith.

Firstly, I agree with the post that more spam does seem to be creeping back into the index, but in my experience the overall level is still very low. Let's not forget how bad things were in the early 2000's and we a million miles from going back to that.

I really don't think Google is resting on it's laurels, and sometimes I'm sure you take a small step backwards to make a bigger leap forward. I remember about a year ago there was doom and gloom that Google had lost the plot with more irrelevant international search results appearing in Google UK results, but that's been fixed by-and-large.

It seems a little melodramatic to say:"the world of search marketing and the amazing utility of search in general may come to an end."

Really? I mean really, do you believe that is going to happen even if Google self-destructed? Obviously you don't because you qualified it in the next paragraph! Maybe one day another method of search will usurp Google from it's massively dominant position, but if it does, so what, Search Marketers are an inherently adaptable bunch. People looking for stuff online, one way or another, isn't going anywhere. Businesses need help to be found online, and that's where we come in. If it means one day I do more Social Media than Google lovin' then so be it.

The worst case scenario to me is: "SEO is dead, long live Search Marketing."

Danny, you viedos are certainly getting better. Your style of presentation is becoming more professional and you've worked on your handwriting for the whiteboard! It's legible! Huzzah!

One thing I'm not sure I agree with:

"If you want to just do on page optimizations, you can have a lot of opportunity to boost traffic quickly."

I think this is only going to be the case if you work in a particular niche, this won't be the case if your site/product/service operates in a mass market. What it can help with in the immediate term though is possibly local search (if that's relevant to your business model) and most probably your CRO. If you sort out your on page copy then at least the traffic you do get is going to be more likely to convert (however you set your conversions).

Apart from that it was very useful, particularily the rebuttal part of the video. Always interesting to hear how others answer the "yeah, but..." questions.

andfl, which is basically what I said! The thing is, many people are scared and intimidated by graphical information. They don't like numbers. So an analyst has a responsibility to make this vital information easily accessible to a wide variety of business stakeholders. A complicated stack graph (with all it's shortcomings I outlined) does not do this. Just because you understand something because you created it doesn't mean that anyone else will.

"They're not lying to you, but they are obscuring the truth, and they're making it impossible to know what's going right and wrong."

...was music to my ears, and I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately for me, the post went completely off the rails when I was presented with the graph that apparently cures all your ills. If anyone on my team presented me with a graph that looks like that, they'd get quite a short shrift from me.

I understand you are now desperately stabbing your thumbs down button, but allow me to say:

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not intelligence, intelligence is not wisdom

What we have here is basically data presented in a graphical way. ("Well, duh, I hear you cry, of course that's what it is...") Well for me, we've barely achieved "information" on the scale above let alone "Intelligence", which is what we should be aiming for (wisdom comes only with age).

I see a graph with no title, no labelled axis and ambiguous date range. Yes, this is a little harsh, I understand that is it largely a technical exercise so I can ignore these Crimes Against Analytics for now. The thing is, there are way too many segments of data here, it looks like a geological map with an oil field at the bottom. The user is bombarded with so much that we cannot take it in and make much sense of it, especially if this were in a presentation where we don't have long to study it. Sure, do this for yourselves but don't present this to anyone. It is too complex and does not allow someone who is not intimately familiar with your workings instantly grasp the subject matter - they cannot glean much information from it to formulate knowledge. It is very unclear how much traffic each segment is actually sending and we have no idea what the numbers actually mean.

Analyics is simple: Why; What; What Next.

Why do you want a figure, what are the numbers showing me, what should I do about it from a commercial stand-point.

Agreed. The whole "users can opt out if they want to!" approach has left Facebook facing a terrible reputation hammering. Just because they are big now, doesn't mean they won't be blown out of the water by something "cooler" further down the line with privacy issues coming back to haunt them.

We more Internet savvy people may not have a problem with understanding how to adjust our privacy settings or turn unwanted features off, but that isn't true for the majority of Internet users. As patronising as this sounds, I think they need to be protected because a lot of users don't know any better. Corporations (imo) have a duty of care to protect their customers personal data ethically, regardless of whatever your local laws may be. That's why this whole post doesn't sit easy with me.

That's a really useful video for anyone wanting to get into the industry. Although many of the tips are generic into any industry someone may want to start off it, the practical steps for getting into SEO I think would be useful, especially for maybe graduates in these tough economic times.

Then, just as I was scratching my chin musing on how lovely this video would be for a new starter, you throw out this bombshell:

"You could be the greatest SEO in the world but if no one knows who you are then it doesn't matter"

Err.. what? This is what really grates me about the industry. Continual self promotion, the culture that if you're not talking about SEO, then how could you possibly know about SEO? Well, no one knows who I am, I'm pretty anonymous on here and I'm doing alright thanks. I work on international brands, and I don't have a blog, Twitter account or a desire to speak at a conference.

Even if you're self employed, when you're established you'll have a portfolio of past work and clients which is better than making unsubstantiated claims about your SEO prowess in a blog, or retweeting some SEO tweets. It could in fact be damaging if you purport to be an SEO then say something totally wrong. All I'm saying is you don't have to be an "industry figure" to figure within the industry. It's an option, not a requirement.

Sorry for the rant, because I really did think 99% of that video was very good. (Apart from your drawing skills - fail!!!)

The compiled list is interesting, and it's kind of fun trying to place yourself on the list of experience somewhere. Although if I meet anyone who refers to themselves as an "Oracle" or a "Guru" in a non-ironic way, I do have to stifle a giggle at the pretentiousness of it.

I understand what you are saying firegolem. There is some very useful information here which I'd like to share with some of my more receptive developers, but when a video is conducted in such a flippant manner, it is very easy for those who will be more sceptical to change to dismiss it as being of little or no value. It's just a slight re-balance of professionalism against humour I believe the above poster feels would be helpful, although I of course accept everyone has their own style of presentation, and that I'm coming across as a proper killjoy now!

It would also be useful if you could please learn to write more legibly (i.e. bigger) on the whteboard so I didn't have to keep scrolling down to the text below to see what it says.

Ross, I am in agreement with much of what you have said. I also am amused by the fact that people have decided to thumb down your post, which seems to be the immediate knee-jerk reaction of some users of this site if others dare offer some well written and objective constructive criticism of a Staff member post.

Hey-ho, I just opened myself up for the same treatment.Jennita is of course correct; people have a habit of commenting and thumbing posts before they read them, even the non-technical ones. Ross was suggesting that to add true value to the SEO community, the SEO community must be able to comprehend what is being said. Is that such a wild notion? I don’t think so. As it happens I agree with you both that Ben's rebuttal was thorough and excellently written, for Dr Garcia, and other statistical experts. It was an extremely important post and did indeed add weight to the importance of SEOmoz's excellent work within the SEO community, and defending the work that you do.

That said, it is not excellently written for most SEOs, which does not devalue it as an academic piece but it does mean that it's value is limited to (I would guess, I can't prove) most SEOs. You have to articulate appropriately to your audience, and yes, that can be difficult without appearing to be "dumbing down" (a phrase often cited at the UK media, I don't know if it's used elsewhere). Should there be a simpler version in addition to this? Yes, because we need to draw people into maths and specifically statistics. They are important aspects to our work, but people get scared and disenfranchised, and subsequently may in their own minds devalue their significance.

Now then, to my original reason for commenting! It may have been noted I was critical of Ben's posts in the past. I would like to point out I only studied statistics as a small part of my university degree, and I have the up most respect for Ben's work.

I believe it to be accurate, thorough and of benefit to the reputation of the SEO industry. My issue was with the way, in the first of Ben's two recent posts, how the data was displayed graphically (22nd April post). I did not like the way the scales of the graphs were inconsistent and changed throughout the post, stretching and distorting the significance of the findings. Yes, the text explained that a 0.2 correlation was weak, and yes I agree with your point in rebuttal number 5 that it was worth reporting and that "correlations in the 0.1 - 0.35 range quite interesting".

However, if we assume from Jennita (and I agree with her) that people don't always read the posts fully, I think it makes it all the more important to have accurate diagrams and graphs because people will look at these and not read the accompanying text which qualifies it. I must stress that I feel this was adequately addressed in the June 8th post, but I just wanted to reiterate what my original criticisms were, and that I am pleased they were largely addressed subsequently.

I agree that it would be an interesting extension to the experiment (purely for academic reasons!) to have left the paid link up longer for the new domain you set up to see how long it would take for Google to realise what was going on and issue a penalty.

I appreciate you don't want to "pollute the index" any more than is necessary but in the interests of online science I'd have liked to have seen those results.

SEO Practices, (and with a nod to gfiorelli1 & goodnescowboy) I could not agree more. I was actually considering writing a youmoz post on this very subject. (Though not sure I will now, it's been covered in these comments!)

That's a great little round up and I think you're right that sometimes some gems pass by quietly in those videos. Finding the time to watch all of them is pretty difficult, it was months after the event until I realised my own question had been answered one time in one of the vids.

Ok, that makes more sense. Still, it might come back to the fact you sometimes have to turn down business if you don't want an unworkable set of demands from a client to come back and bite you at a later date.

I'm aware that, especially in this economic climate, that sweeping statement will have many people spluttering into their coffee.

Totally disagree. If we use your own logic that someone who searches for "boob job" will have a lower IQ, then we can assume - using this flawed train of thought - that they are also likely to have a lower income and therefore unlikely to convert into a paying customer. It is unlikely we want to class an action as signing up for a newsletter... it's hardly a topic people want monthly updates on.

What sort of conversion did you have in mind for this person of low IQ that would be useful for the plastic surgeon?

Sorry, you "don't have any great insights on that"? With respect, managing customer expectations and having the ability to explain what is and isn't possible should be one of the first things you learn in SEO agency life...

A very interesting video, I certainly picked up some useful advice. A lot of it confirms some stuff I already knew (or thought I knew) so it's reassuring to have this confirmed by Matt. I hadn't really given consideration to stes having downtime and then being crawled so I'll bear the 503 in mind.

I'm concerned though that Rand thought Google a) kept bees inside and b) they produced green honey. He may want to tune into the Nature Channel once in a while!

P.S. Please sort out your acoustics when you film these videos, the sound quality isn't very good.

You've put the shortcomings of such results far better than I could (as I have tried to explain in previous similar blog posts here). I agree that it is good that (finally) some context was given at the start of this post (which was lacking in previous similar efforts) but I totally agree with you that this appears to be ignored or not understood by the majority of repodants here, thus placing too high a value on such research.

Certainly an interesting quandary. If you find yourself in this kind of situation it's certainly worth taking your time and making incremental changes especially on competitive key phrases as alluded to here. It may be a case of just being greatful for what you have! The suggestions seem pretty sound to me although some are fairly dramatic so I'd definately start with the smaller changes just to try and nudge Google in the right direction.

Doing "nothing" (apart from monitoring the situation) is a viable option sometimes, but I think these are good tips if you really feel the need to do something about it.

Thanks for linking, I hadn't read all of them replies. Some of the explanation is a little beyond my knowledge but it's good it was addressed so fully. I now accept that there is some "statistical significance" to the result, but the "much higher correleation" part of the analysis still doesn't sit comfortably with me. Statisitcally significant yes, "much higher", no. Possibly I'm just nit-picking over semantics now.

For me, this is a welcome return to form in your posts Rand. This is an excellent resource which I for one have certainly learned from both in terms of new material and re-affirming things I already believed to be true.

I don't have the facility (read: "time") to do a lot of testing, so I can't prove or disprove any of this but your research gives the impression of being thorough and therefore highly useful. The diagrams really help too!

I can definitely relate to point 7 regarding the strength of random page links from quality domains. Some months ago I was working on a friends site and we managed to get a mention on the bbc.co.uk site from a page way down deep and almost immediately I saw rankings boost for not only the particular page they linked too but the site in general. Obviously that’s not scientific but it certainly mirrors your experience here.

The only minor issue I have with this post is point 2, I’d really like to get a statisticians opinion on whether .18 to .225 can really be defined as “a much higher correlation” on a Spearmen Correlation scale. I used to (a few years ago) dabble in this statistical method and I don’t think you can justify making such a bold statement given the numbers you produce. Obviously I don’t know your sample size and all your methodology on this one, and I’m far from an expert on it myself.

That aside, thanks for sharing this work, it will definitely be something I re-read several times.

Hi, I agree that GA has come on leaps and bounds and I am a huge fan of it. If I had it my way, it's what I'd use. However, the shortcomings you point out are why we do not currently use it although if it continues to develop at it's current rate it will soon have all the features we would probably require. I admit my choice of words describing GA wasn't the best in hindsgiht, I gave an impression I hadn't fully intended.

Yes, I accept what you're saying. I think perhaps I just didn't like the way that small section of the original article was written. My point is if you don't trust a specific metric, then this may be because you know it is wrong because of your intimiate relationship with a website. Therefore further investigation may be required as to if the analytics pacakage is properly tagged in all relevant areas of your site rather than blindly accepting the figures as as good as they're gonna get.

However, the point that no analytics data is 100% accurate I agree with, so long as all relevant stakeholders are aware that the numbers are not absolute then there isn't usually a problem. That, once again, comes back to one of the most important parts of an SEO/web analysts job: education of others.

Well said that man! Although I am fortunate enough to work in a team where there are dedicated web analytics ream members (thus allowing more freedom to tackle the SEO), I still find it baffling so many people who purport to be SEO professionals cannot even comphrend the most basic fundamentals of analytics.

My organisation doesn't use Google Analytics (it's great for SMEs but it's not really a professional package) so I haven't used it in over a year but I it is so incredibly intuative I genuienlly sruggle to understand why people can't grasp the basics. Next I'll be reading here that people think "average time spent on site" is a useful metric?! (I sincerely hope not!!)

Overall I thought it was a good post although I vehemently disagree with the paragraph entitled "What if I don't trust a specific metric?". That is unprofessional and shockingly gun-ho.

If these industry events were really on the ball, we could pay for live streaming or downloadable content from the events. At a level of detail less than the benefit of attending live but still worthwhile information worth paying for.

So for example you could pay to watch the presentations, or a selection of presnetations from a certain track but obviously you don't get the networking and maybe the Q&A without actually being there.

It depends if we want to be a single global community of industry peers, or carry on as the have and have-nots, isolating those excellent SEOs who for one reason or another don't or cannot attend these events. In my most humble personal opinion, we should also not lose sight of the fact that just because someone is speaking at an event, does not necessarily make them an authority on the matter. (This is not directed at anyone here, it is a general observation).

This is way off topic now, but I think it is an interesting debate to be having, I hope people don't mind.